A Flexible Medical Image Archiving and Reporting System

Abstract

Nowadays diagnostic imaging systems have being used as a daily routine in medical institutions. The evolution of electronics, image technologies and communications has led to quick growing a quantity of medical applications and devices, that process visual information for diagnosing and treatment purposes. For quality management and patient protection reasons these systems are integrated into complex hospital information systems (HIS). Radiological imaging has the highest standardisation level and is widely used with PACS and within Radiology Information Systems (RIS). Unfortunately, other modalities, e.g. ultrasound, microscopy and etc., are suffering from a lack of standards for creating, processing and archiving image material. To fill this gap, many research and commercial organisations have been proposing various local solutions. This paper describes an approach in the application development that supports physicians in selecting appropriate decisions and provides image archiving in a flexible way. The application is positioned first to be used in echocardiography.